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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  July 17, 2011 12:15am-1:00am EDT

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row lit fest to talk about his vote, "dietrich bonhoeffer's letters and papers from prison" a biography. it is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> thank you very much and welcome to the printers row lit fest. we are delighted to have thisop opportunitypo to talk with you about a particularly interesting idea, the idea of the biography, not of a person but of a book. h that idea is the recent author of just such a biography, dr. martin marty, who is professor emeritus of history at the university -- of religious history at the university of chicago, as many of you already well know. and he has written a biography of dietrich bonhoeffer's letters
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and papers from prison. it's one of three books that's kicking off a series of such books from princeton university press. and to start our discussion, i want to read the press' description of what they're trying to do and then ask dr. marty to comment on it. they say that this new series recounting the complex and fascinating histories of important religious texts written for general readers by leading authors and experts is intended to trace how their reception, interpretation and influence have changed over time. often radically. as these stories remind us, all great religious books are living things whose careers in the world can take the most unexpected turns. now, dr. marty, you've also recently completed and published a biography of martin luther, a
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lutheran who somewhat predated dietrich bonhoeffer. [laughter] what's the difference between with writing a biography of a figure like luther and be -- and a book like bonhoeffer's? >> there are far more similarities than i thought i would find. when princeton university press described this series and asked me if i would be a kicker offer of it, it took me about five minutes to sign the contract. it was a new challenge because i didn't know anything like this. the first thing you have to do if you're writing a biography of the book is forget about biological analogies. that is you don't want to say the book was born this way and went through adolescence and all those things. [laughter] they don't do that. but they have careers, and they change in the light of the passage of time. think of almost any book you read 20, 30 years ago and think
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of its reputation now. think of the vonnegut books and the books that were big in the '60s and '70s if you're old enough to have been around then. very different books now. malcolm muckeridge marshall mcclewin. i'm in the ms today. [laughter] cultural superstars then, and they don't show up now. so that's, i think, the first thing. the other thing is the biography of a person, you dig into letters, you dig into reminiscences and so on. here you have mainly a narrative of where it's gone, what's happened to it along the way. and it was such a delightful concept that when i met the other authors and like to tell them about who some of these authors are or what they're
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going to write about because that gives you a sense of where you can take this, the diversity that's been going on. >> the other two books that have already been published in the series, one is a biography of augustin's confession by gary wells who has, of course, written about augustin several times during his career. and then this is a biography of the tibetan book of the dead by donald lopez who's up at the university of michigan. each of them treats this idea in each of the three in a different way, and still, and some of the books that are still to come in this series also promise to be very interested. vanessa oaks is writing, bruce chilton who many of you may have heard of is writing a biography of the book of revelation. [laughter] so -- >> if he finishes it in a hurry. >> yeah, yeah. right. [laughter] i think october 20th is the
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deadline. [laughter] the dead sea scrolls. you did, you did try to avoid those anthroto morphic moments, but i thought one thing you said that was quite important was to think about, um, not just the physical object, but its soul, the book's soul. so in thinking about dietrich bonhoeffer and what he left postwar theology, what is the -- when you were thinking about the soul of his letters and papers, how did you come to assess that in terms of its effect on its readersesome? >> aristotle and leon cast and i define soul this way -- [laughter] >> good threesome. >> soul is the integrated, vital power of any organic body so
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long as it is open to possibility and opportunity and so on. um, a corpse has the same corpuscles that the hand did, but it can't do anything anymore. what's missing? soul. and i think that's what i look for in bonhoeffer. for those of you who haven't done a lot with bonhoeffer, i'll just say a few little things about him. the first thing that strikes me is he lived as long as martin luther king. when i'm on campuses and very often senior generation, i often ask them name four people in, say, the spiritual field that made living in the 20th century worthwhile. well, you hear mother teresa, you'll hear martin luther king, dorothy day and bonhoeffer, they tend to be the top four on the list my part of the world will say. and he lived to be 39, and the last three years were in prison.
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so, basically, he lived to be 36 plus the little book i wrote about. this is the newest edition of the book i wrote about. this is the one you might want to buy because it's affordable and carry bl, and this one costs $80. but it's a 16-volume series of somebody whose writing, basically, stops at age 36. and meanwhile, he was active in underground activities, he was in, a double agent in the cia of germany, if you want to call it that. he spent a year in america, he went to barcelona, he had a church in london. all these things are crammed in there, and my search for his soul is what held him together. that's obvious that as a christian he was an ordained minister, you naturally look for where the resources of that faith were. and i find that he's held together by promise. the last thing he said as they led him to the gallows was,
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"this is the end, but for me it's the beginning." and you can read that a lot of ways. you can take a traditional doctrine of the resurrection, you can take it somebody who's fulfilled all he can in his life, and yet he can foresee what's going to happen because everything was unfinished at that time. so i think that was where i most saw his soul. >> one reason, of course, that we write biographies of anyone or anything is that we believe that the impact that that person has had on others has been in some way transformative, the biography of washington, a biography of lincoln, think of any of those. and so of necessity, a biography of a book is about the impact that it has had on its readers and the uses to which they've put that. and so of particular interest to me as i was reading your biography of the letters and
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papers was to think of the different kinds of people that it changed. do you want to -- and they are not at all similar in many ways which is fascinating too. do you want to -- can you speak to that? >> the book has been translated into 34 languages. i can why it in bogota, i -- buy it in bogota, i bought it in cape town. you can buy it anywhere in the world. it, obviously, travels. people read it, things happen. its first round happens to young people who are thinking of vocation. some of them wanted religious vocations, but others steered their life in the light of it. , that's not the central use today, but just the variety of some of these impacts. the first, i brought a couple samples along. the first big book about him gives you a sample of what it goes to. an east german communist theologian -- that sounds very
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contradictory, but the stalinists were running east germany. in fact, the very town where bonn bonhoeffer went to school and studied was one of these headquarters. they allowed a few universities and a few theological fact faculties, humboldt university was one of them. and they had to allow theological faculties because the majority of the people were catholic and reformed, and they had to comply with what was pushed on them. but subvertly they were keeping things going. my wife and i visited a theologian. their daughter was a 14-year-old, and she could never go to university because she was going to confirmation class. they couldn't suppress -- they couldn't suppress the act of worship, but they could keep everything else out. bonhoeffer's adapting to that, and he takes all the passages in scriptures or anywhere else in which jesus is the figure that
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impels you out into the world, and that's what could happen here. now, whether miller is himself a communist or not, it was approved by the communist authorities. then another sample -- i won't do more of them, but it'll show you a variety -- in south africa, this is bonhoeffer in south africa. we visited there the last year there was apartheid. a young leader in a movement that helped bring down the regime, they were reading bonn how farer because they were -- bonhoeffer because they were learning from him how you outlast regimes. and it had an enormous impact in that way. the hardest thing, i think, was to figure germany itself. first of all, the conventional historic lutherans had real problem with him because luther liked where paul the apostle wrote every soul should be
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subject to the higher powers, and if you resist them, you're condemned. obviously, bonhoeffer's resisting the powers, he's ready to kill the head man. what are you going to do with him? his own parish was not allowed to use his name as a memorial. the closer you got to that, the east germans had taken to it right away because he was upsetting some of the things that they were after. today it's very different. there's a bonhoeffer church in london where he served for a year. almost anywhere in the world except his home church, he's not the only prophet that's had that trouble. [laughter] but they're getting, now, to the point where they're accepting it as you do. they do not think and i do not think he was perfect. he didn't think he was perfect. he was, essentially, a pacifist, and pacifists don't normally try to bring down the head guy. and he was in a conspiracy that
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finally failed, the death penalty came about because the bomb didn't go off on hitler all the way. how can you do that? by the way, in prison he was also writing a book called "ethics," it's a very important book that people still read. and how can you do this? you're a pacifist, you don't believe in killing, and yet you are in on this plot. and he said, if you were in a street and a madman were coming along in a truck and you had the chance to grab the wheel even though it's going to kill him, you'd do that, wouldn't you? i like to quote paul, a professor in paris from chicago some years ago who said sometimes you live by what you call an ethic of distress. you don't say what you're doing is right, you're saying the circumstance in which you have to do something as one novel in world war ii said, you must do what you must do and then say
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your prayers. [laughter] so he had a theology and an ethic, and then he had to interrupt it for this and then go back to it. and i think the chronicle of that, you don't find that in the book of his letters because he knows he's doomed at the end. but these letters are written for different purposes. he has a fiancee, a very young fiancee, writing love letters to her. he wrote -- i can't do c-span without mentioning his best friend in life, his biographer and someone -- he's been in chicago sometimes, 1966 i got a signed one from him. i'm a groupie, too, like to collect autographs and books. [laughter] and the letters to him. his parents, letters full of culture. can you send me a new copy of plutarch? one of the reasons? he liked fat books.
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because some of the letters were in code. if you wonder why the letter the, page 1, put a pinprick through the t. page 3 he put it through h. takes a long time to do a sentence, but plutarch served well for that. and he kept those things going. so that combination. but most of the deep letters are the ones that have drawn the most attention on the world and were those to his best friend. and these were hidden. obviously, some of them were legal, but many weren't. they were hidden in gas mask canisters. they were dug up years later. people would find out where they were. and none of this would exist it can not for the best friend. he saved them. so many people asked to see them, and he stitched them together and made the book. >> and it's an interesting fact about all three of these books that are launching this series. in many ways they're not books
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that someone sat down to write for a particular audience, the tibetan book of the dead really also stitched together by the person who discovered those texts and sort of americanized them. bonhoeffer, certainly, never would have imagined his letter ors and papers being assembled in this form. and, of course, augustin, although we see him sitting and writing in picture, he had scribes that were doing the work for him. sort of -- the idea that a book effects people justifies a biography. another thing that fascinates us about people and that we look to read about when we read their biographies are the turning points in their lives. that mark a shift in perspective or a new chapter. what turning points did you find in the life of letters and
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papers from prison? >> one of the most interesting ones was the common touch. bonhoeffer was from an aristocratic family, his father was a top professor of psychiatry in germany at the time. very sheltered life, very privileged life, a nonreligious life. basically, their mother taught them some hymns, and he graduated from berlin and got a one-year scholarship to america. and we're talking 1931. he headed to union seminary in new york, and his best friend there was frank fisher who was a african-american, the only one there. and he took him to ab sin yang baptist church, and i think that's a big turning point. he really learned -- you have to remember, a berlin professor, i would say their books, their footnotes had footnotes, it was that kind of world he lived in. [laughter] and here he is in the baptist church, he fell in love with the music. he came back in 1939, his
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friends wanted to protect him. they smuggled him back to new york. he didn't stay there more than three months, and he said i can't dunk this, i have to be back. if germany's going to survive, i have to be a apartment in its suffer -- a participant in its suffering too. so i think that carried through all the way. this vision of peace was interesting to me. he picked it up in barcelona and mexico. he was planning, when arrested, to go to meet gandhi. and, again, the peace vision was very big for him. the day hitler came to power, 1933, he was giving radio address. i didn't know it until i was reading the good new biography of him. it was the only time he was ever on the radio. it was cut off in the middle. we who like romance would say hitler's people turned it off. the engineers made a mistake. [laughter] it was on the principle of
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having a finishing uhrer -- fuhrer. some of the people in the catholic and lutheran churches played up to hitler. there was a movement in which they tried to make hiterer's germany into -- hitler's germany into a christian anti-semitic force. the vast majority was just sort of silent. what can you do in the middle of all that? but he got committed very early and hung out with the whole underground of people. i think the other thing that i would say is turning point is a new today we call it the ecumenical movement n. the 1930s it was being born, and they wanted to form what became the world council of churches. it was postponed until after the war because of the war. but he was an early agent of it, and that's one of the things that served his cause.
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he got to conferences in the switzerland, sweden, england. the archbishop who was over anthony eden was his contact person. and what you had there, some of you have seen the movie valkyrie, but that's the circle he was with. and they are, again, aristocratic military people who wanted the allies to drop the idea of unconditional surrender. because they said if that happens, then germany will surrender, and we can rebuild and so on. anthony eden was not ready to bite it. it would have been high risk for anybody. but, again, the exposure to people of the other churches around the world, catholic, almost none of that happening in the '30s. so i think that opened him to a larger vision. >> the book you cite there from the church to the world partly
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grows out of this idea that came in one of his late letters that you mentioned. he talks about the world that has come of age. and that phrase and the implications of that then were seized by a variety of people in the years after the book was first published. i mean, can you talk a little bit about how the uses of the book by the various camps, if you will, of theologians and philosophers had ab impact on -- an impact on postwar germany and then, by expension, others. >> and others, including america and england. yes. my, yes. when you think of a book as a life, you have to think of anybody you know when you're writing about it. if you're ab abused child of that person, you know a secret about 'em, and you can never treat them some other way. if they have a humility and an inner aristocracy, you know it, and you're guided by it along
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the way. so when you pick the life of a book, you do the same kind of thing as this man in germany did it. then it traveled to england. there was a famous book called "honest to god" by a british bishop. it traveled to america, the death of god theologians had their moment with them. many of you may not know that one october day "time" magazine had a cover saying god is dead, and they wrote about three people who thought so. and then easter came along, and god was living again, but they had their moment. [laughter] and dietrich bonhoeffer was their hero. why? back to your question. some of the radical ideas he was pursuing that adds to the interest in the book, he had seen the terror of a religion taken over by the state. in a way that's what hitler was doing. he saw a lot of false piety,
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people pray, pray, pray and then they're anti-semitic or something like that, really bothered him. so he had kind of a three-pronged thing. first of all, we use the word secularization. he saw secularization. germany, which had this long religious tradition, it was being jetsonned in the universities, and some of the books he read while in prison dealt with that. and so he, a strong influence on him was carl bart in switzerland, and he just studied as much as he could from the book. bart had written a book called -- it wasn't a book, it was a 50,000-word footnote. [laughter] you could count 'em. called "religion is unbelief, "because he believes people form a caste about their religion that keeps god from them.
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so he didn't think the a total tragedy that secularization was coming, he said, let it come, live in it. don't force people back in the middle ages, live in it. the world has come of age, the german word is adulthood. of this concept, this is the one i have some problem with because if you look at western europe, you really believe it. if you look at the modern university, you really believe it. if you look at entertainment, you really believe it. around the world religion's never had it so good. religions are booming. in bonhoeffer's part of the world and ours there are 3,000 fewer christians every 24 hours. in sub-saharan africa there are 18 million more every 24 hours. oceans of ink -- 18,000 more every 24 hours. we're more religious, and we're
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more secular. a great student of this, david martin, once said i can name this series in one phrase. is this religious or secular i'm talking about? texas baptist millionaire. [laughter] he doesn't want his preacher to talk about allowances and is so on. and the other -- but that led him to that whole new mark, if you will. he wasn't looking for a market, he was ready to die. but then he talked about religionless christianity, and that's what confused people. he used the word to show how you develop a piety so god can't get at you, and he wanted you to get rid of all those things. he didn't stop worshiping, he led worship for the fellow prisoners, but he did believe that the show we put on very often stands in the way of it. and then the question is, what should he say about jesus christ in the whose divinity he believed? but he said the church should
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always argue about what all this means, and if all the things in the new testament and the church that would fit in religion christianity is jesus christ as the man for others. his whole life is that, and we're supposed to model it that. so you can carry these to go deeper in your faith, or you can carry it and say let's throw it all out. >> if you were, if you were to identify the single biggest impact of this book on religious thought today, what would you say that it is? i know we'll -- if you want, if any of you would like to ask dr. marty questions, i encourage you to line up ott that microphone in the middle -- at that microphone in the middle aisle while he's answering this question. >> i think there are two main sets of impact. he's still as big as ever. this year there are two monstrous new biographies of
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him. and little ones. there are tens of thousands of things that have been written about him, so he's as prime as ever. but they sort of run on two tracks. the insiders, the people who have studied him all these years, the people who knew him and so on and weren't worried about detail, pick up on this religious christianity theme and jesus is the man for others. the evangelicals which weren't well known in tennessee in 1931, '39 now are the most prosperous religious elements around the culture. they were marginal. they were hillbillies. but when -- in america he goes to a fundamentalist preacher in new york, and the guy's preaching the bible. that's better than a lot of stuff, could have been union seminary. no fence to union seminary.
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[laughter] he didn't believe in these literal second comings that were very big for them. he wasn't a literalist at all, so they were very suspicious of him. but as they see his overall impact, they're taken over and i would say one is impact i've described, the other is the plain letters as a whole. the publisher gave him a cover of his cell from win. windows too high to look out. he always identified when a thrush was singing out it and so on, but he could never look out. teeny-weeny little closet-sized cell. and writing players that are much used. i reproduced a couple of them.
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some hymns which are now in hymn books of catholics as well as everybody else. and i think just the fact that his spirit -- used the word soul before -- has survived those circumstances and has a strong impact on people today. so one is the whole book, the other is late theology and final letters. >> sir, you had a question. >> yes. thank you. pacifism, when you say bonhoeffer was a pacifist, pacifists are against the death penalty. bonhoeffer was trying to be part of the firing squad. and you notice how he had a conflict with the lutheran thing about supporting government. well, jesus wiped out authority in mark ten 42:43. show us why bonhoeffer couldn't respond to that and resist? >> good question.
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i'm glad i don't have to write a biography on the book of jesus. [laughter] i don't know any place where one little text people make a lot of. jesus' own texts are nonviolent throughout. the sermon on the mount, you turn the cheek, you do all these things. and he's rarely been followed all the way. bonhoeffer, certainly, made an appeal to it. his probably greatest book, most influential book is a little book called "the cost of discipleship," which is nothing but his interpretation of jesus and the sermon on the mount. it's a very famous line in there, you know, jesus says you follow me, you're high risk. and bonhoeffer said, when jesus christ calls a person, he calls him or her to die. so he was that devoted to what's this. but he -- what's there. but he also enjoyed the life that jesus also enjoyed. >> bonhoeffer could have died either way.
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>> with what's that? >> bonhoeffer could have died either way, nonviolently resisting hitler. he did die probably trying to resist hitler. >> yeah. well, it took him l a year and a half to get to him, but, yes, he knew he was doomed. again, if you're trying to shoot the head man, you're doomed. they had all the power, and they got him. so there's nothing, there's no other alternative for him. he could only live by his witness. thank you. >> another question. sir, thank you. >> as one who's not even sure how to spell bonhoeffer, i know little about him. but what led up to his imprisonment and final death? what was the background? why was he in jail? >> okay. that's a very good question. and, by the way, my name is marty, m-a-r-t-y. [laughter] >> i've heard of you.
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>> bonhoeffer, and you should hear the people in taiwan pronounce it. [laughter] cape town, their accent. why he was in prison? first of all, he was a resistor all along of hitler. and those people in the cat click the lutheran and reform churches that resisted were really marked. everyone knows the only peer for bonhoeffer was martin neumiller, he'd been a u-boat captain in world war i, and he says first they came for labor, and i didn't speak up. and then they came for the jews, and i didn't speak up. then they came through -- he goes through a whole list. and he said finally they came for me, and there was no one left. and i think bonhoeffer was with that movement from 1933 on. so he's a marked man. every move, the more records we
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have, gestapo knew every move he was making. well, they thought they knew. he did other things on the way. finally, he was caught -- some of you following news may know of a major conductor who was a nephew of bonhoeffer. one of bonhoeffer's sisters was married to him, they had his number. one of his sisters married to a jewish lawyer, and they had to leave for london. he would have been killed. so all these things raised all these flags. and i think he would have been put in prison anyhow, but the death penalty waited until the attempt on hit her's life. and -- lit hitler's life. and when they got all the files, bonhoeffer was with technically in what was like the cia, they had smuggled papers there. and when a different faction took over and they got the keys to all the files, he was guilty as could be. >> he was found out.
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yes, sir. >> so you mentioned that universities in europe became very secular, but africa became very religious. does it bother you that more educated part of population became secular, but very uneducated became very religious? and yesterday professor christopher lectured here, and he said people who do not believe in evolution should not use cell phone. [laughter] or if you don't believe in science, you should not use the fruit of science, you can pray. [laughter] what is your -- >> yeah. i believe in evolution, but i also use a cell phone. [laughter] yeah. well, that's an extreme statement, but there is something to it. in general, it's been not only evolution, but many other features.
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i did an eight-volume study, six-volume study of fundamentalisms around the world in 23 different religions, and all across the board they they e critical of modernity, etc. , and yet in every case they can outdo moderates and liberals and use the media. they were better at radio, better at television, better at internet and so on. so you put these worlds together in very different ways. the generalization is certainly true, the majority of people in higher learning do this. i think of darwin said when i start out in science, i put my beliefs on paper in a drawer, and years later i pulled it out, and it was crumbled and old. he hadn't worked at it. a lot of people in sciences do work at it and think fresh thoughts about religion. but your generalization, i think, is genre true. -- generally true. but i don't think it's uneducated. again f i took you to -- i
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taught at cape town the year before the change, and the leaders of the yes, christian resistance and a couple jewish resistance there to the government were their top scientists at the hospital where christian barnhard was. and i had seminars with people, in fact, six different religions in south africa. everybody's there. hindus were there all the way back to gandhi's time. communists, catholic protestants, so many gradations in those days. black, colored, everything. and we studied the religious view of human rights, and they were highly educated people and highly intensely religious. i think it depends on what you devote yourself to, and if you're a busy scientist, that's what you devote yourself to. >> and i, although the question wasn't directed to me, i'll say, you know, having read these
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three books and read you the partial list of some that are to come in the series, there's certainly an opinion in parts of the academy that there are still, there is much to be learned from understanding how the great religious texts or many face bear on the world today. and partly what we see, i'm a journalism professor. what we see around the world, too, is as people acquire literacy, they acquire the urgency to ask questions in new ways. and partly, we see that to in many institutions are rejected for the first time because someone suddenly getting the ability to ask questions. t an interesting phenomenon that makes books like this no the less important. so, sir, you have a question. >> yes, my name is gary. i could pretend i'm in
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occasional audiences on c-span where it's a think tank and they're unemployed. christopher hill was a co-author of the book, he talked about physics for poets. by the way, he thinks global warming is a problem, he does. and be i interested my -- mentioned my interest in h irk- hi my --hi-fi equipment. i mentioned stipeway, but it -- steinway, but it includes the amply fire, and christopher hill said he'd like a steinway as well. so we have to notice the difference between short-term trends and long-term trends. if people are more religious than they were yesterday than today, it doesn't necessarily mean they will always be more religious. so trying to come up with something worth you're hearing, how can will people believe in the literary reality about faith
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when there aren't the same kind of supernatural miracles that are supposed to prove that god exists such as the parting of the red sea? and even a silent film by cecil b. demille. i saw that part. they used gelatin, and there were heat jets that purposed, and -- burned, and like john fulton did in the later movie, they came together by reversing the movie, reversing the films. i like special effects. >> [inaudible] >> oh. well, about how long -- >> well, i think i've got the heart of your question, and i'll give a quick illustration -- in 1960 the book came out called the year 2000. wonderful book, early use of computers just coming in. and he -- they, hudson institute put it together -- and the book
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starts with long-term, multifold trends. and among them the first 18 were about secularization and religion. so they said the future of the world will be that everything will be determined impairically -- impairically. there were about ten adjectives. empirical, concrete, pragmatic, a whole list of these things. and then they said, because they were not dumb people, we're looking long term instead of the short term. and if you look at the long term, he listed a lot of philosophers of the 20th century, almost all of them envision a future in which the human story is too loaded up to be carried along pragmatically and contractually. and, therefore, we foresee it
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could take many forms. it could be revitalization of the old religions, ominous new religions. we're seeing plenty of that. a lot of that's going on. and i would just say everything we know so far about ourselves and people as a whole is there is so much we don't know, so much mystery, so much amplitude that every breakthrough in science means another breakthrough in arts, in religion too. so -- >> one brief follow up. there was a book i remember reading -- >> we have to,. -- >> religion without revelation. >> that's one of the ones we've quoted. >> we've come to the end of our time. i thank you for your attention. one idea that is, that dr. marty quotes is the idea from another author on the subject. as they're expressed, bonhoeffer's ideas are not
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merely disturbing, but they're actually dangerous. and we've even seen some of that in our discussion today. and the impact of dangerous ideas on culture and society has always been an important one, and i personally thank dr. marty for writing this biography to remind us of those ideas in the work of dietrich bonhoeffer. thank you for coming today. you'll be able to meet dr. marty. [applause] he will autograph books for you what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i just finished reading position points by president was, and it was really good. i enjoyed the conversational tone that he took in describing his presidency and the events,
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the big events like 9/11 and some of the other events that were part of his eight-year presidency. i am in the process of getting to karl rove's new book as well as hank paulson's book. i don't know that anything has had more of a lasting impact on what we are talking about today than what happened a couple of years ago with regard to the economic meltdown. i think reading secretary paulson's autobiography will be enlightening. i got pretty frustrated with him by the end of his time as secretary but i want to give him the benefit of the doubt. and see his side of the story since he was there. and front and center with all the discussions. i'm also reading a new book, a
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local alabama author called the final summit because it is an inspirational journey. he takes real people from the past winston churchill, abraham lincoln, george washington carver and he leaves them in a fictitious way but using real life examples to inspire us to be better leaders and andy is a personal friend. i also just finished every reading which i do every year of my favorite book of all time and that is robert lee's "to kill a mockingbird." she is not only a resident in my district but is someone that has touched the world. i think it is -- to the bible in teof

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